The LIMN BLOG

12/08/2022

Over the last year, I’ve absorbed the slow process of House at Sailor’s Grave becoming ‘lived-in’: slipping away from the plans and drawings, references and specifications. It is no longer a palette but a place. There are no longer dreams of what it might be: these dreams are replaced by experiences of it and stories about it; by shared meals, morning sunlight, an evening by the fireplace.

What a pleasure to not only work on crafting this house, but to be witness to how it is transforming into a lived-in home.

I’ve put together a few more thoughts about this often hidden but incredibly rich part of the architecture process on my journal - please see the link in my bio.

We’ll be sharing more snippets on

Builder
Photography

02/08/2022

Via del Parione, Firenze
May 2022

Four women, arm in arm, recount their days to one another in the early evening sunlight that streams down the western arm of the crooked Via del Parione. All along the street, anitique stores shut up for the night, street lamps come on, and restauranteurs pull tables out onto the pavement for the first diners.

28/07/2022

Milan | Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
Visited in the evening sunlight during Fuorisalone di Milano

June 2022

Milan is a place of progress, a city relentlessly reinventing itself.

Re-visiting Milan one week after Florence I couldn’t help but hold them side-by-side in my mind. The romance of Florence is met by the reality of Milan, the almost overwhelming echoes of the past that inhibit Florence are cut through by the Milanese visions of the future.

The Fuorisalone, or Milan Design Week, is in many ways a microcosm of the way this city operates on a larger scale: with vigour, creativity, and a no-holds-barred approach to invention and celebration. The sprawling, wild outpouring of ideas and things is at once impossible to take in completely, and completely absorbing.

There’s a rhythm to life here, a way of seeing the world, of creating the world, that’s intoxicating. Not only during the Fuorisalone but especially then. I can’t wait to come back.

01/12/2015

STUDIO | DONALD JUDD

Photograph by Elizabeth Felicella. “The given circumstances were very simple: the floors must be open; the right angle of windows on each floor must not be interrupted; and any changes must be compatible. ” — Donald Judd It was 1968 when Judd purchased a 5-storey cast-iron building at 101 Spring Str…

30/11/2015

CHARLOTTE PERRIAND

Charlotte Perriand in her studio in Montparnasse, ca. 1934. Photo: Pierre Jeanneret, © 2010, ProLitteris, Zurich. “The extension of the art of dwelling is the art of living.” — Charlotte Perriand, 'L'Art de Vivre', 1981   There aren't many people who seem better placed to discuss an art of living  t…

30/11/2015

PRINCESS OF WALES CONSERVATORY

India Hobson via The Garden Edit It all comes back. Even the dampness underfoot; even that brings it back. I was in Kew Gardens when I first realised how much everything yearns to grow.  I was just twelve, quietly sure-footed in the world. Afterwards we went back to the apartment, and it was raining…

30/11/2015

SPLASHING

Splashing. Richard Serra, 1968. Richard Serra's 1968 work Splashing is one of those inherently evocative works which takes on new lives through the different media it engages.  The process of creation is embodied in the work: hardened lead thrown against the base of a wall when molten. Once solidifi…

17/11/2015

IT ISN'T THE SUN

Hiroshi Sugimoto | Seascape:   Aegean Sea, Pillon, 1990.         via c4gallery POEM “The minute gears mutely whir. To put your ear Against it is to put your ear inside it. It does not tick. It isn’t a heart. It has no pulse. It isn’t a clock or a wrist. Scrutiny can coax no secret from it. There is…

29/10/2015

IT TREMBLES TO CARESS THE LIGHT

James Casebere: La Alberca, 2005/2006 Photo: courtesy Goetz Collection  “Epilogue Those blessed structures plot and rhyme- why are they no help to me now i want to make something imagined not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens it trembles to caress the lig…

25/08/2015

HOTERE, MANHIRE AND MCQUEEN - CONVERSATIONS IN SPACE

  Dawn/Water Poem, 1986. Ralph Hotere. “Language makes arrangements. These might be compared to the behaviour of water, an expression of energetic relations among molecules. There is activity at the meniscus where tensions arise from oppositions juxtaposed. Understanding the singularity of the prese…

16/08/2015

FRANK STELLA

Frank Stella, New York, 1959 - Hollis Frampton My first introduction to post-painterly abstract artist Frank Stella was when I was about 9 or 10. As part of one of those classic and formative childhood school projects, we were asked to research an artist and then to produce work 'in-the-style-of'. I…

10/08/2015

LOST LOVES

“Identity is a graveyard of lost loves and former identifications. ” — Freud, once upon a time. Recently, I've dug up some old sectional drawings which eke out the bodily blur. I always find that sections are especially revealing of such identifications - they let us see through things, beyond the p…